In recent years, there has been a surge of development and releases of new types of mobile devices made available to the public. Today's consumer is often equipped with a smart phone, tablet, MP3 player or other device that can be used to access the internet, download and view digital media (e.g. video and audio files), and perform a wide variety of other functions. Given such large numbers of devices and device types, it is quickly becoming a non-trivial task to make media content available to all of the consumers across their various devices. In fact, many companies are spending large fractions of their time and resources managing, scaling and maintaining media processing systems that may have nothing to do with their core business. These companies are looking for encoding systems and services that can provide the best video/audio quality to consumers at a low cost. Because digital video (and audio) content is often delivered to multiple device types over unmanaged networks with fluctuating bandwidth, it is desirable to utilize transcoding to produce a version of each asset to accommodate these variants.
In some environments (e.g., cloud computing environments), multiple users can share resources (e.g., cloud resources) such as remote servers and data repositories, wherein the users can concurrently send multiple requests to be executed against the same resource. Problems can arise, however, since there is a limited amount of capacity for each type of resource. Conventional systems address these problems by providing dedicated resources to users and/or purchasing additional capacity, but such approaches are expensive and often result in unused excess capacity. Further, each resource can have more than one type of capacity, such as a compute capacity, a throughput limit, an available bandwidth, and other such aspects. Since conventional systems do not optimize the usage of various types of resource capacity for shared resources, there often is excess capacity in one or more of these capacity types even if one or more other types of capacity are being substantially fully utilized.